Monthly Archives: February 2014

When researching keywords, it gets tough when you worry about the competitor’s selection. There’s only so much rank you can get for a single keywords and your mental dictionary is running thin on the alternatives. The craziest part? Sometimes these competitors aren’t even after the same target market!

Like Christmas and Thanksgiving, Valentine’s Day is a special occasion for meeting someone special. Perhaps the only real difference is the number of people. Think Romeo and Juliet, the Cowherd and the Weaver, or even Calypso and Davey Jones.

Even if not an official holiday, it’s certainly treated as the one day where couples forget what keeps them apart. Such a special occasion certainly merits plenty of planning.

But now that the day is over, don’t you think those planning skills can still have use beyond the holiday? B2B marketers and sales reps could certainly use them to avoid the consequences of missing vital appointments.

Cliché as this may sound; real love thrives beyond Valentine’s Day. In the same way, real business connections should grow more valuable after they are made. Leads and appointments aren’t one-night stands. Having many ‘connections’ doesn’t guarantee you anything. Unfortunately, there are still marketers who treat the appointment setting process as if it were a production line of potential customers.

If you were in the shoes of that potential customer, how would you feel? Not too hot. In fact, there those who even equate this with the slave trade. Yes everyone has quotas to meet. (You have your marketers, your salespeople, and ultimately everyone else who has a stake in your revenue.) That’s still no excuse to deny the humanity of those you’re making B2B connections with. Marketers are expected to be professionals, not professional skirt chasers.

Like any aspect of today’s marketing, SEO shares the responsibility of painting out pictures of ideal buyers. One way is through the keywords it uses to direct the creation of content as well as understand the most common problems that prospects are often searching about.

But whereas B2C marketers use it to paint out certain individuals, B2B marketers more often use it to paint out entire organizations.

Science fiction has a sweet record when it comes to predicting the future. Take the idea of robots taking the helm of basic human duties for example. It’s an idea that’s not too far from what was seen on the CES Robotics show. The weirdness of it all didn’t take away the fact that these new technologies could prove useful. It’s a common prediction that robots may one day be the ones taking over tasks that are too dangerous for humans.

Setting that aside though, being a B2B marketer does not exempt you from bracing for the same future. With industries like robotics constantly making breakthroughs, lead generation campaigns will have new demands and new markets to target. Today even marketing communications are already influenced by the internet and new technology.